


What was I to you?

by GlowwormiK



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Loss of Identity, Memory Loss, Post-War with Altea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 18:29:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11903667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlowwormiK/pseuds/GlowwormiK
Summary: Shortly after Altea is destroyed, Haggar and Zarkon struggle to remeber what they were to each other in previous life.





	What was I to you?

Shortly after bombarding of Altea and the subsequent cleansing of surrounding areas, the Emperor sends all his generals away. Their joyous exclamations and subservient remarks leave him completely cold. Haggar turns away, too, but he tells her to stay.  
  
He has hunched just a bit on his throne, barely visible, but she notices it nevertheless. Her master remains silent; having crossed his fingers and put his chin on top of them. This gesture, completely new and still oddly familiar, makes her heart miss a beat. He sat like that before, she thinks. But what did I do then?  
  
She is unsure what to do. There are more chairs in the room, but she doesn’t know if it is appropriate to sit without her emperor’s permission. Who is she even to be so audacious? She knows that he is the most important person in the galaxy to her, that she would die protecting him from any threat and could expect the same from him in return, but this knowledge is emotional, intuitive. When she looks at him with a cold, unbiased eye, he scares her to death. This mismatch bothers her all the time, and now it fells almost like physical pain.  
  
Finally, she makes a few steps back towards the throne and remains standing.  
  
“Did you remember your name?” he asks suddenly. His voice echoes from the metal walls and sounds even louder and scarier than usual. Haggar can’t help but jump.  
  
“No, Sire.” She has to answer. This is not enough, she feels it. He frowns.  
  
“Anything else from your meditations?”  
  
“I had a cat, Sire.”  
  
“A cat?” he now looks half angry, half surprised. “What cat?”  
  
“It was a male, your majesty. Black, with a red nose. I would carry him around and he would sit on my working table, begging to be scratched. He would constantly lie down on my papers and I had to pull them from under him. I remember feeling irritated, because…”  
  
The Emperor strikes his fist on the metal of the throne.  
  
“Nonsense! I need facts, Haggar! What was the cat’s name? What species was he exactly? How and when did you acquire him? Who else saw him?”  
  
Haggar has to avert her eyes. She has no answers. He stares at her for some more time, his nostrils flaring angrily, and then turns away.  
  
“What else?”  
  
“Almost nothing, Sire. I remembered standing on a balcony, looking down on a big city, in the evening. I am pretty sure I was alone. The city was a couple miles away, well-lit. Roads, mostly, and a couple of spires. “  
  
“Was the balcony half-round, with brown marble?”  
  
Haggar nods.  
  
“It was the castle. But we already know you lived there, too, this doesn’t bring us much. What did you feel like?”  
  
“I was happy and content, my Lord.”  
  
He shakes his head.  
  
“This is all useless.” He goes silent again. "There is one thing that we need to investigate, though.”  
  
Haggar leans forward with anticipation, her emperor turns his head to her and looks at her very attentively, his eyes narrowed.  
  
“It the question of your heritage. How can it be that I have an Altean as one of my closest people?”  
  
His last words feel like a punch in the stomach. They confirm her own dark fears; they validate the horror that makes her heart heavy each time she looks at herself in the mirror.  
  
“No, my Lord!” she exclaims. “I cannot be Altean! I am loyal to you and you alone!”  
  
I shouldn’t have said that, she realises, I sounded like a sycophant, but it is too late. The Emperor doesn’t turn away, though.  
  
“I am not questioning your loyalty. I am asking you about your race!”  
  
“But I am not Altean! I can’t be!” He grins.  
  
“You have altean ears and hair. The markings on your cheeks are altean.”  
  
“Those are not markings, they are scars! This is all a ridicoulous misunderstanding, your majesty!"  
  
“Of course they are markings,” the Emperor says heavily, “just deformed for some reason. But if there is more. Remember how you cut your hand when trying to get up from the slab in the morgue?”  
  
He taps several times on the info terminal, and nods her to come closer. It is a blood sample analysis, just the basics. But among the text, she sees words that make her feel dizzy. A list of proteins and hormones, all of them typical for alteans. It is true, then. She suddenly feels weak and has to walk to one of the chairs to keep her knees from giving in. The decorum stopped mattering. She can’t make herself look up, but she feels his gaze upon herself.  
  
“You knew all along,” she finally says. “Why did you keep me close? How could you trust me?”  
  
“Several reasons,“ he says after a pause. “First, you were important enough to die together with me in our previous life. Also, we were close enough to lie together with me in the morgue. Second, you don’t have many options. To alteans, you must be a traitor, you couldn’t run back to them and tell them my secrets. Thirdly, you don’t remember your own name, who else would you betray me for, if you don’t know them? And, finally, I didn’t actually trust you. I gave you pieces of information and watched where they would resurface. But they didn’t, your loyalty was impeccable.”  
  
She should feel flattered, Haggar thinks, but instead she feels betrayed.  
  
“I gave you everything I had, and you tested me?“ she asks, finally looking up. He doesn’t avert his eyes.  
  
“What would you do if you were me? Let an enemy agent lurk through my general headquarters? Send the single most important person in the universe away and face the risk of never seeing her again? I must have kept you by my side for security reasons, but how could I know you really are, if you don’t even know it yourself anymore?”  
  
“Why are you telling this to me now?” Haggar asks quietly, her fear for him is now completely gone.  
  
“Altea and everyone on it are dead.” Zarkon’s voice is also uncharacteristically sad. “Whatever connects you to it is gone, too. But it is only the beginning. I will expand my empire to the end of the universe and I will hunt quintessence wherever I can find it. I can’t do this alone; I need you both as a scientist and as a person. How can I demand commitment from you if I don’t give it to you myself? What king would I be if I plotted behind the backs of people I need to trust? I am telling this to you so that you could be sure that I repay your extraordinary service with extraordinary trust.”  
  
This is so him, Haggar thinks suddenly and struggles to swallow down a painful knot in her throat. He is the foundation and the walls, something I could always rely upon unconditionally. She doesn’t remember anything certain, but the feeling is overwhelming.  
  
“Let us repeat what we know. You lived in the royal castle and we spent a lot of time together. You had your own laboratories and many subordinates, but we know neither their names nor race they were from. You remember studying quintessence and finding out that it can prolong life. Yet somehow we managed to die. There are no portraits of you left, and no entries in the databases. We have no idea what you looked before, considering that my eyes changed colour. We don’t know why you forgot everything except your work, while I kept a certain part of my memories.”  
  
Haggar nods. There is not much to add.  
  
“And I only remember Daibazaal, not Altea. Perhaps I never even was there? Perhaps I grew up the Galra?”  
  
Zarkon thinks it over.  
  
“Yes, this is possible. Probably we met early in life; this might explain the degree of closeness we experienced. You could have been like family to me.”  
  
The word “family” makes Haggar want to cry, but she suppresses the urge.  
  
“But to be honest, I don’t feel the sister vibe from the past.” Zarkon leans back. “And this is a secondary question. The important one is what you were to me when I started ruling. I can think of only two options.”  
  
They are now looking straight at each other.  
  
“You were either my _vizier_ , or my _concubine_.”  
  
Haggar opens and closes her mouth.  
  
“I wasn’t your concubine,” she says, offended. “This doesn’t feel like me.”  
  
“How do you know what is like you and what doesn’t?” Zarkon looks curious now. “Anyway, it is pretty easy to check. Come here.”  
  
Haggar obeys and makes several steps towards him. He bends forward and, before she can protest, hugs her and pulls her into his lap. She is now facing him, sitting with her legs bent and spread apart, feeling like a frog pinned to a laboratory table. Her dress is stretched uncomfortably on her knees and gathered in a knot under her bottom. His heavy hand lies firmly on her back, preventing her from escaping. For a split second, he examines her face, a strange hesitation, but then, without any explanation, Zarkon bends towards her and presses his lips to her.  
  
She doesn’t really remember what a kiss should feel like, but definitely not like that. His lips are stone-hard and as cold as the metal of his armour. He doesn’t move or open his mouth, just sits there, pressing their faces so hard together that her teeth bite into the back side of her lips. There is no tenderness in this touch, no playfulness, no joy. It is suppressing and demanding, it makes her wish to slip between his fingers and never return again.  
  
Luckily, it ends pretty soon. He moves back after a couple of seconds.  
  
“No,” he says calmly. “You really weren’t my concubine.”  
  
He shakes Haggar off his knees and stands up. Now he towers above her; she has to bend her neck painfully to look in his face. There is a strange emptiness in her chest she cannot quite process, something between disgust and regret.  
  
“You were my vizier, then,” he concludes almost joyfully. “And you shall stay that. You will act outside of all ranks, reporting directly to me and having access to me any time of day and night. You will use my own code to all the information; this way, you will see all the same that I see. Don’t let the generals intimidate you, you are higher than any of them will ever be. If they will forget that, I will destroy them.”  
  
Before she can ask anything else, he turns and leaves. She looks him in the back, but it is only after the door closes, that she asks herself a simple question.  
  
  
  
_How did he even get the concubine idea?_


End file.
